marketing to new clientelle

[Brendan Coots]

I know many others will have differing and diverse opinions on this, so here’s mine for what it’s worth:

Asking prospects to come to your web site is not only tough, but it might not matter much. That is, you want people to come to you when they are ready to buy, not just because you ask them to. Even if they fall in love with your site, demo reel and your company, timing is everything and by the time they are ready to buy, they very well might have forgotten your offer. Current customers probably won’t forget you, but getting them to come to your web site just because you put one up is a tough sell as you pointed out.

Also (again, just my opinion here) spending a lot of money on mailers asking prospects to come to your web site might not be the best use of your web marketing budget AT FIRST. If it were me, I might first spend that money getting good rankings on the search engines (Google is all that matters, period) and perhaps buy some Google Adwords for the keywords that are impossible to rank high in organically. The reason is simple – people searching for what you sell are usually ready to buy, making it money well spent.

My studio gets a surprisingly large chunk of our leads from our web site, but only because we spent the time and money to achieve decent rankings in a select set of keywords, and spent a decent amount on adwords every month. From there, doing typical SEO activities such as getting good links to our site, improving the text and layout for search engines, etc. has given us high enough rankings that we are almost ready to ditch Adwords altogether since our organic rankings are doing so well. I assure you, this is time and money well spent since it acts as a salesman for you, provided that the site is well built and appeals to visitors enough that they convert into real leads.

All in all, my advice would be to use your money for SEO and other efforts that will bring NEW leads to your site, and find a more compelling reason to contact current clients and those targeted prospects. Mailers are okay, but typically require repeated (as in 4-8) mailings before the prospect even reads them, much less responds. From everything I’ve experienced doing them, and the word from other marketing people I know, mailers have a very low response/action rate since, like email spam, they are a very common item for decision makers to receive daily.

Again, I’m sure others will have vastly different views on the subject, this is just based on my own personal past marketing experience and current role as the “marketing guy” for our studio. Some people might get no action at all from Adwords, and great response from their mailers. Either way, good luck and here’s to hoping your studio succeeds!

Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com

[Scott Whitney]

Thanks for your comments/input Brendan. We definitely plan on getting involved with SEO work. It’s certainly a specialty in it’s own right.

Your comments all sound very reasonable and I can tell, “you’ve been there”. There are all kinds of different approaches a business can take in terms of marketing. We’re trying to take advantage of the “newness” and the actual launch, as well as trying to add a “wow” factor in the mailing we do.

We’ll see how successful it turns out to be. 🙂 Hopefully I can provide some input and try to be an asset to this forum in the future. Thanks.

Scott
__________________________________

Bright Circle, Inc.
Orlando, Fl.
“We put the Idea in Media”
swhitney@brightcircleinc.com

[Brendan Coots]

Cool. Please do let us know how it goes, because if there’s one thing I’ve learned in marketing it’s that there are no guarantees of success OR failure, and just because we weren’t as successful with mailers doesn’t mean you won’t be.

Good luck, and hopefully you’ll be posting here often!

[Rsavicky]

It’s very important to have an overall marketing plan that will raise your visibility and lower your overall cost of sales. As part of this plan, it is vital to have key messages that differentiate your company from your competitors; these will be used throughout your company — from sales to marketing as well as “informal” conversations about your company and what you do. I hope you have thought about this for your mailing …